Mother-Writer
Photography by Angela Garzon | Create with Gusto
By Shanthy Milne
I recently came across an idyllic-looking writers residency for women — a beautiful countryside cottage complete with log-fire and a courtyard garden. What made it particularly idyllic (but simultaneously inaccessible to me) was the absence of any child-related paraphernalia. This got me thinking about Virginia Woolf’s idea that in order to write, a woman requires both her own money and a “room of one’s own”.
I imagine I’m not the only writer within Motherscope’s community to have put the finishing touches to a piece of writing whilst hiding in the bathroom. I can often be found writing there, leaning my back against the door and trying to ignore the paint chips flaking to the floor with each pounding of little fists on the other side.
I’ve heard stories from other mothers-writers of novels completed in cars, or even inside cupboards where, if you’re lucky, you may be afforded a few minutes of peace before being discovered by your children.
But despite the inherent hurdles and interruptions we face as mother-writers, I’m conscious that my writing owes its greatest debt to motherhood.
I began writing about motherhood several decades before I truly knew anything of it. As a child, I turned to poetry as a means of coming to terms with my complex and often fraught relationship with my mother.
A decade later, I was still writing about motherhood, this time at university where I obsessed over literary deconstructions of the mother, honing in on the ways the maternal body was altered or corrupted in gothic novels.
Yet another decade later, when I finally became a mother myself, I was hit by an intense wave of often ambivalent emotions which opened my eyes to motherhood in ways that had previously evaded me. The sudden rush of extreme love took my breath away, but it was juxtaposed by anxieties and an almost incapacitating loss of identity. As a writer, the process of mother-becoming exposed me to layer upon layer, unchartered feelings relating to the past, present and future of my motherhood experiences, all of which I have slowly been navigating and coming to terms with through the act of writing.
In the moments when I’ve felt overwhelmed by motherhood, turning to parenting guides or manuals has often exacerbated my feeling of inadequateness. Conversely, seeking out and revisiting literary works that address the ambivalence of mother-becoming without professing to have any answers has proved cathartic, reassuring me that I am not alone in feeling as I do.
In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich outlines with brutal honesty how, “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.” No baby sleep guide or gentle parenting manual has offered me greater affinity or reassurance than these words, born of the challenges of mothering from outside the mould of the idyllic, altruistic mother-figure that is so often held up before us.
In writing about motherhood, writers such as Rich, Woolf and even Simone de Beauvoir address the challenge of how to effectively balance writing and creative self-fulfilment alongside the demands of motherhood. These writers powerfully advocate for mother-writers to maintain their creative practice as a means of coping with motherhood experiences and preserving their sense of selfhood.
Though she had no children of her own, Simone de Beauvoir observed with penetrating insight the way motherhood, when viewed as a patriarchal construct, can rob women of their creative energies, entrapping them within a mundane sphere of repetitive tasks. Yet despite having no wish to become a mother herself, Beauvoir was not condemning motherhood (which she acknowledged as having the potential to be fulfilling) but rather, the patriarchal construct of motherhood as an institution that robs women of their autonomy and freedom to set and pursue their own personal goals.
Many mothers do indeed sacrifice their dreams in order to have and raise their children, whether out of choice or necessity, but there is also another version of this story. In the alternate version, motherhood can become a door of opportunity, unlocking dreams you dared not pursue before you had children, or those dreams that life simply sidetracked you from.
For me, motherhood provided a moment of pause from the momentum of my old life, and through the lens of motherhood, I was able to clearly identify where my purpose lay and realign my goals.
Specifically, motherhood presented an opportunity for me to re-examine my relationship with writing and to recognise the vital role it has always played in my life, even when at times it has been pushed to the sidelines instead of taking its rightful place, centre stage. In motherhood, writing became a means of self-preservation, revealing itself as an antidote to the almost obliterating identify-theft of motherhood. In the words of Adrienne Rich, “For me, poetry was where I lived as no one’s mother, where I existed as myself.”
Rich advocates for ending the myth of ‘maternal sacrifice’ and the idealised concept of the eternally altruistic mother in favour of a more independent, fulfilled and autonomous mother-figure.
Viewing motherhood as an opportunity for positive transformations of women as individuals and not just as mothers can be a way of achieving this. However, it requires a society open-minded enough to see beyond the limitations of the idealised (yet often unfulfilled) mother-figure. As a society, we are familiar with the male-centric mid-life crisis refrain and its potential to knock men off their life’s trajectories. In many ways, motherhood is the equivalent for women. Even women who choose not to have children or are unable to do so are not immune to the pressures of patriarchy’s idealised mother-figure mould. Indeed, this unrealistic ideal is held up to all women of a certain age and the question of mother-becoming can lead to life-altering transformations even when the outcome does not involve children.
Decades after feminist writers such as Rich, Woolf and Beauvoir revealed their truths, the pandemic has lifted the veil on the supposed progress we have made as a society with regards to the perceived autonomy we afford women in mothering roles.
As work lives have encroached into our home lives during the pandemic, we have witnessed women bearing the primary burden of childcare on top of or at the expense of their own professional and creative pursuits.Thus the work of these literary figures remains as relevant today as when first written.
I’m often asked now if I work and what I do. It’s taken me five years and a lot of professional encouragement to build up the confidence to call myself a writer and stop defining myself by my former career or my role as a mother. Yet when I answer that indeed, I am a writer, I’m often greeted with a blank look that immediately ignites the anxieties and imposter syndrome I’ve spent so long trying to suppress. I can’t help but wonder — would a man receive that same look if he declared himself a writer? To be a man is to be entitled to family-life and work-life and to have your needs prioritised. Even in the subtlest of glances, assumptions and acknowledgements there is power that is gifted to men and subtracted from women.
Now that my son is at school I feel determined to counter these notions lest they simmer away and threaten to engulf me. I have commandeered the use of a set of trestles and a tabletop that once served as a spare for my husband’s work. Each day I wrestle these items out of our shed, and set up my very own writing space. Albeit not quite a room of my own, (ironically, the only one of our rooms with enough space for it is my sons bedroom), it is, for a small part of the day, a place of solace and creativity. Wrapped up in my son’s blankets, I sit here and write until my fingers and toes go cold.
In writing through and beyond our motherhood experiences, we are liberating ourselves from the constraints of motherhood as institution. We become autonomous and are granted some agency within the transformative process of mother-becoming. In turn, our children can grow to witness the duality of our transformation both as mother-figures and crucially as individuals. Of her own mother, Virginia Woolf wrote “of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away form her to see her as a person.” Thus, by occasionally closing the door on our children and finding the freedom and space to write, we can begin to redefine our boundaries and sense of self so that we can truly be seen by the people around us — including, of course, our children.
SHANTHY MILNE is a writer, journalist and documentary producer with ten years’ experience producing films focused on marginalised communities for UK broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4.
She now resides in Amsterdam where she occasionally writes and teaches documentary film making to undocumented migrants. She also serves on the policy council of Liberty - a UK based human rights organisation.